The present invention relates to a thermal image transfer recording medium from which a thermally fused ink layer is imagewise transferred to a recording sheet, thereby recording images on the recording sheet. This recording medium may be used, for instance, with printers of computers and word processors, and bar code printers.
Conventionally, there is known a thermal image transfer recording medium which comprises a substrate and an image transfer layer formed thereon comprising a thermofusible material such as paraffin wax, and a dye or pigment. However, materials such as paraffin wax lack mechanical strength so that a thermal image transfer recording medium comprising paraffin wax has the shortcoming that images transferred from the recording medium to a recording sheet are poor in friction strength.
In order to eliminate this shortcoming, it has been proposed to add a thermoplastic resin to the image transfer layer or to minimize the thickness of the image transfer layer. The former method, however, has the shortcoming that image transfer cannot be properly performed, or the thermal sensitivity of the recording medium becomes poor as the amount of the resin components in the image transfer layer increases, while the latter method has the shortcomings that the uniformity of the transferred images is poor and the image density thereof is low.